Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Eikthirnir

I love animal skulls. I think they have a very grisly appeal, with interesting lines, places for the eye to explore and complexity without being overwhelming. One of my projects to practice mesh was to create a deer skull because of the complexity of the shape and simply how impractical it would have been to do nicely in sculpts.

It lay around unfinished for a while, until my Halloween masquerade started to loom on my calendar. It seemed like the perfect time to take it out, dust it off and finish it properly. After I did the high definition version and settled on a final shape, I wanted to add a little something more. Since my masquerade was themed for glowing in the dark, I had to add something that glowed! I spent some time carefully decorating it and the antlers with some kickass tribal paint:

Eikthirnir (Eikþyrnir) is the name of the stag that lived on top of Valhalla in Norse mythology, eating the leaves of Yggsdrasil. It means "old thorny" and from its antlers all river waters were said to spring. Maybe it's not the perfect name for a deer skull mask, but I've already used all of the cool genus names on antlers. In any case, my paint designs don't feel completely out of place in my vision of an ancient Nordic deer skull. The skull and the antlers are actually two separate pieces, so if you want you can simply wear the mask and match it with any of my other antlers (they might not meet up perfectly with the skull but that's where modifying is so helpful.

Eikthirnir comes in nine different skull colors, and the paint is a separate, tintable layer. For my masquerade, I made it white and glowing, but you have complete freedom with it. You can turn the transparency up to 100% if you like and just have the skull alone, or embrace it with a dramatic black that goes with everything.

If you're enamored with the antlers but the mask isn't necessarily for you, who would I be to deny you options? These are one of my favorite pairs of antlers as of now, and again if you're not a fan of the paint, you can just turn it transparent. I've been loving wearing these around.

The antlers include the same color palette of the Rusa antlers, with twelve colors including grayscales and a variety of natural-ish colors. They look great with or without the paint and can scale down to tiny sizes if you have a teeny faun you want to be adorable.

1 comment:

This is a stunning creation and I think the name suits it perfectly :) Just had to get this the moment I saw it. I eventually worked out that I needed to edit-select-face to tint the paint but you might add that in the notecard so as not to leave people floundering, it's not as obvious to non-designers as you might think ;)

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